My third and final attempt to wake up early to phone BA failed today on three separate counts. Firstly, I didn’t wake up before 8am. Secondly, when I did wake up, I got myself into a complete confuffle trying to work out what time it actually was.
My phone had lost an hour overnight through a time zone change compared to my laptop, and my early-morning brain spent an age trying to work out the real UK time. By the time I cracked that particular problem, it was already 9am in the UK. Thirdly, I had no mobile signal and spent an unnecessarily long time trying to work out how to place a Skype call through Microsoft Teams — a sentence that probably shouldn’t exist in 2026.
We wandered up to the Lido buffet for breakfast. It was chaotic, and we ended up taking our very delicious Eggs Benedict out to eat by the pool area, which was no hardship at all. We had no firm plans for our first ‘at sea’ day and were looking forward to being busy doing nothing.
After sitting for a while, we wandered to the World Stage to listen to the first in a series of port talks. The theatre was full. The person giving the talk clearly understood her audience and made her various important points by repeating them at least three times and getting the exuberant, mainly American crowd to repeat after her things like: wear trousers in the temples in Bangkok, get your tender ticket, and be on time.
After a while I was bored and left Karen to peruse the free library. As usual, there was an interesting selection of quite up-to-date books to borrow. I did wonder how many books “go missing” given there’s no booking-out system, and also why there were no books about the Titanic. I also assumed that any books on Norwich City by Ed Couzens-Lake had already been snapped up.
From there we wandered up to the Crow’s Nest to get Karen a proper coffee. We sat for a while watching the sea glide by and doing some quality people-watching. There are a varied mix of nationalities on board, with many more British passengers than we’ve encountered before. In some brief chats in lifts and corridors, some of them even appeared to be normal. I exclude the two people I’ve seen wearing Liverpool and Man United shirts. Many Americans also seemed quite distracted by the NFL playoffs.
After grabbing a late lunch in the Lido buffet again, we went down to our overnight Kanchanaburi excursion pre-meeting. Not only had we not received the proper invite, but we’d also been given the wrong time by the excursions desk when I’d asked about it. Not the best start. We waited the 30 minutes until the meeting actually began.
We were given a pamphlet containing some details, all of which the chap running the meeting then read out loud. It was entirely pointless. What annoyed us further was that the itinerary had changed since we’d booked it. In particular, a scheduled visit to the POW Museum — which I was very keen to visit — had been removed. A beach visit had been added instead, which didn’t feel in keeping with the rest of the excursion.
I spoke to the guy running the meeting afterwards, who had no clue and didn’t even know what a POW was. I was not a happy bunny, but apart from having a whinge I wasn’t sure there was much I could do. I did, however, immediately write an email to our H&A cruise consultant in the UK to vent my spleen.
We sat outside on deck for a while before heading back to the Crow’s Nest, where Karen started with another coffee before joining me in ordering some bubbles. Even then they managed to lose our order for 30 minutes — not that we minded, as we were in no hurry and both caught up on holiday admin and chatted about whether we would like to do a cruise to take in the Panama Canal, Chile and Peru.
Eventually we headed back to our room to change for dinner. We arrived at the dining room slightly earlier tonight and had no problem getting a table. We both had the beef tenderloin, which I thought was melt-in-your-mouth good. Not one to moan, Karen may have mentioned that hers could have been cooked slightly longer and been twice the size.
We accompanied this with the ship’s red sangria, neither of us being particularly enamoured with it, and switched to Cabernet afterwards. We even got another one to take to the Rolling Stone Lounge, having decided to skip the electric violinist in the main theatre.
If I’d thought the lead singer, the Romanian Monica B, had shown potential on the first night, she absolutely blew us away tonight. She and the band got the whole lounge rocking. Jose, our parrot-voiced cruise director, flew in from nowhere to own the dance floor. He is clearly living his best life and is a perfect fit for the job. If Karen’s hip had been more stable, I’m sure she’d have been jiving the light fantastic with him.
It made me smile watching the various individuals strutting their funky stuff — many of them could have been characters from sitcoms at an end-of-season wrap party.
We were conscious of our early start the next morning for our first excursion, so we headed back to our room just after 10pm.
Then the fun really started, as we discovered a note under our door saying that overnight the ship’s time would gain an hour. So the day ended as it had begun, with both of us confused — and possibly after one drink too many — trying to work out what time to set the alarm for the next day.
I set one using the ship’s phone, figuring that must be right. I also got Siri to set one on my phone for Thailand time. I also set one manually. As a further failsafe, we set one on Karen’s phone, which I’d set not to update its timezone automatically. If one or more went off an hour early, we decided we could live with that.
With the sea gently rocking, we turned out the lights — in almost the correct order — and settled down for the night having no idea what time we would be up in the morning.
